ambient

Ambient music is a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Ambient music is said to evoke an “atmospheric”, “visual,” or “unobtrusive” quality. According to Brian Eno, one of its pioneers, “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” As a genre, it originated in the United Kingdom at a time when new sound-making devices were being introduced to a wider market, such as the synthesizer.